When you’re a company affairs skilled who’s been feeling the ESG backlash, you’re not alone.
New analysis from Trellis information companion GlobeScan and the College of Oxford discovered that in Europe and North America, company affairs professionals say pushback in opposition to ESG has change into extra pronounced, with roughly half of respondents reporting elevated resistance in opposition to this agenda previously 12 months. On the similar time, company affairs professionals in different components of the world are a lot much less more likely to report experiencing extra resistance. This divergence underscores a crucial level: though ESG is turning into extra contested, rising resistance to it’s removed from common.
What this implies
Nowhere are the results of rising political and financial pressures extra seen than within the expansive area of ESG. Typically misrepresented as a car for ideological agendas, ESG stays a significant lens via which firms interpret their working setting and form strategic conduct. For company affairs, ESG stays a central, but more and more advanced area. Regional disparities are widening, and political forces are reshaping each strategic priorities and narrative framing. On this shifting panorama, firms could have to undertake extra nuanced, regionally attuned approaches to ESG within the years forward.
Based mostly on the Oxford-GlobeScan International Company Affairs Survey of 245 company affairs practitioners performed February-March 2025.
